Young Elders

A while back, that being a week or two ago, I slapped a couple bits of information up on the ol' blog about aperture. Hopefully, you were able to find some useful applications for your new found brilliance and prowess in the camera world. After reviewing the blog though, I came to realize that a few dandy notes on aperture had been left out like the ugly duckling in a aqueous game of follow the leader. Do ducks ever play anything besides that? I guess I have never seen ducklings do anything besides follow the mother around. Second of all, why does the mother always get to be the leader? Sounds like a big bowl of lame sauce to me.
The ugly duckling that was left out was that reducing your aperture to the smallest setting often not a good idea. The reason for this being is that shots taken at a lens's largest aperture possible will often loose their sharpness. So, while your are indeed fuzzing out all distractions in the background and allowing a ton of light in with a huge aperture, you may also be making your primary object of interest a bit soft around the edges. Unless you have an uber expensive lens, your shots will loose their sharpness as the aperture gets to its final stop or two. The shot that was taken above was shot somewhere around an 8 I believe for the aperture, but in hindsight I would have liked a bit more depth to the field so as to include the two box elders nearest to the box elder bug in the center.
The other duckling that I forgot can be a bit cumbersome and confusing at first, but like any duckling, it has potential to be very useful. If you have looked into lenses much, you will have heard of an f-stop. An f-stop is a marker for the various sizes of the aperture by either halving or doubling the amount of light being let into the lens. If you have your camera handy, please scroll through the aperture sizes now. Most likely, the numbers that you are seeing are not exactly in any common sequencing that you learned in your school days. The reason for that being because they are f-stops and not bus stops. They are divided up by the halving of the light or the doubling of the light. It may be possible that your camera, like many cameras these post-modern days, has more options than just the basic f-stops, which is fine.
One disclaimer that I would like to throw out there is that I am not a professional and I have never taken a class. I may be very wrong in my explanations and am very open to correction. As always though, I hope that you find this enjoyable and helpful and please post any questions that you have.